Reciprocating Structure

In 2013, Architecture and Interior Architecture students from the University of Brighton built a pavilion on the faculty’s main site to showcase their design projects at the Faculty of Arts Graduate Show.

The pavilion was linked to the 'Brighton Waste House’ project, a research project looking into re-use and up-cycling within the construction industry.

The pavilion explored how to use off-cuts of sheet materials, such as plywood, that would usually end up in either landfill or incinerators. Our intention was to employ technologies that allowed us to use relatively small components on multiples.

Precedent research led us to reciprocating grid structures, frameworks of mutually supporting beams that link multiple short lengths connected by friction alone to allow a structure to span an area much greater than the individual lengths. Usually made of timber, these structures were first seen in China and Japan arriving in Europe in the 13th century in the drawings of the artist Villard de Honnecourt.

Because of its low-tech jointing system, it is a structure explored in both self-build projects as well as sophisticated sustainable projects. Our interest was in the possibility of finding new uses for rejected off-cuts and in making a large, continuous complex structure that can be fabricated and raised by our “unskilled” workforce of students.

In conjunction with Cat Fletcher of Freegle in Brighton, much of the material was salvaged from construction sites and demolition projects or was sub-standard material from building merchants.